Author Michael Meyer discusses his new book, In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China at a National Committee public program on April 2, 2015. For three years, Mr. Meyer, a National Committee Public Intellectuals Program fellow, lived in a rice-farming community in Jilin Province, documenting the tremendous changes that were occurring. In Manchuria is a combination of memoir, reportage, and historical research, presenting a unique profile of China's northeast.
As the author of the acclaimed The Last Days of Old Beijing (2008), Mr. Meyer received a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He also won a Lowell Thomas Award from the Society of American Travel Writers. Mr. Meyer’s stories have appeared in the New York Times, Time, Smithsonian, Sports Illustrated, Slate, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and on This American Life. He recently taught literary journalism at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Center, and is now an assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh where he teaches nonfiction writing. He divides his time between Pittsburgh and Singapore.